


crawling vines and weeping willows

by queerofcups



Series: fic advent 2017 [6]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Plantboy Phil Lester, The Amazing Tour Is Not on Fire, Tour Bus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 13:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12936465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerofcups/pseuds/queerofcups
Summary: Texas is hot and unending.





	crawling vines and weeping willows

**Author's Note:**

> from the prompt inspiration from hannah hunt by vampire weekend. title is from the same.

Texas doesn’t end.

The bus rumbles through and Dan feels like they’ve been driving on the same dusty roads for the last two days.

It's been hours, really, since they left the last hotel, but all of Texas is weirdly flat, and reddish brown, and dusty and dry.

Dan sits in the tiny lounge area of the bus and looks up from his Gameboy to watch it until he gets bored. The bus is blessedly cool in the air conditioning but the outside just looks hot. They’re theoretically on the way to some weird art installation involving cars, but Dan would believe it if it turned out they were going to Mars or somewhere equally foreign.  
  
Dan looks back down at his game, walking through the tall grass, grinding for XP when Phil plops down next to him. He doesn’t look up until a small, pale grey vine with a nub of a leaf nudges up against the back of his hand.

“Hi,” Dan says, holding out his pinkie for the vine to circle.

“I’m going to shrivel up and die,” Phil says by way of greeting.

When Dan looks at him, he can’t help but cringe a little. Phil’s hair is laying limply on his head and his skin looks papery even from here. There’s a small rash of pink blooms falling from his color but they’re pale and wispy, nothing like the usual explosion of jewel toned flowers that seem to fall from him whenever he’s sitting still too long.

“You haven’t been drinking enough water,” Dan says, closing the gameboy and slipping over to the tiny bus kitchen.

“The water tastes strange here,” Phil tells him. Dan’s certain he can hear the _wshhh-wshhhh_ susurrus of his lips brushing together. It makes Dan want to kiss him.

“You taste strange here,” Dan says instinctually and freezes trying to remember if you can actually hear things from the kitchen back in the bunks.

Not that it matters, maybe. They say they aren’t hiding anymore. And there’s no way the crew hasn’t noticed that they share the back room with it's single bed.

And the fact that one of their employers is cursed to be three-quarters plant is probably more interesting.

“Do I?” Phil asks, and normally Dan wouldn’t encourage such things, but at least the challenging sparkle in his eye is a little more lively than the sad, wilted way he’s been wandering around since they got to hot, dry, endless Texas.

Yesterday, before they’d stopped for lunch, they’d stopped at a little plant nursery. The plants are different here. In America, but particularly across the stretch of desert people insist on making their homes in.

Most of the plants were cacti or succulents. Dan watched Phil rub a careful finger across the spiny needles of cacti and the soft, weirdly fleshy skin of tuberous succulents. He’d frowned at Dan and said that they sounded different in his head, but still felt like they should come along.

The crew maybe-pretended not to hear. Just like they perhaps didn’t see the six mini potted plants Dan had walked out of the nursery with, or the small, insistent smile Phil kept directing at him after he’d lined them up on one of the shelves in the kitchen and secured them with tape.

Dan looks at each of them while he gets a glass of water and hands it to Phil, frowning at Phil until he’s guzzled the whole thing.

“Do you need another?” Dan asks and gets up to get more water, regardless of whatever Phil’s answer was going to be. He absently pets one of the blue-grey plants, trying to decide if it needed water while he fills Phil’s glass.

He sits the water in front of Phil and looks back down at the table, listening to him drink. It’s, objectively, not a fun noise. But, Dan supposes, love makes you not mind things quite as much.

When he looks back up, he’s almost certain that Phil looks a little better, his skin a little more fleshy, his whole self a little more...verdant.

“Thank you,” Phil says, offering him a long length of rosemary.

Dan plucks it from his fingers and tucks it behind his ear.

They sit together, quietly, vines growing over Dan’s bare feet, the quiet music of the gameboy and the hum of the bus bouncing off their bodies.

There’s a whole world happening, around them, below them, between them. But there’s a jewel toned leaf brushing against Dan’s pinky and he’s this close to being ready to take on a gym in his game and that’s just fine for now.


End file.
